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Stanislaus County Superior Court is a pioneer in digital courtroom document processing, as featured in a recent article in the Modesto Bee. Not mentioned in the article is the fact that their successful solution was implemented by ImageSource and features ILINX technologies.

Stanislaus had the vision, and we helped them get there. The technologies used—ILINX Capture and IBM FileNet—have been designated as a solution of choice by the California Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC). The addition of ILINX eForms was added to further streamline courtroom processes. The powerful combination of technologies used offers a robust, scalable and easy-to-use option to automate courtroom processes enterprise-wide.

The family court division has been paperless since early spring of 2014 and is being expanded to traffic, civic and criminal cases, and eventually to the entire courthouse. Clerks search for, and organize documents for upcoming cases based on a web calendar. Judges and commissioners access documents during cases on tablets while on the bench, eliminating a daily stack of about 40 paper case files. Legal documents that require completion during a hearing are now electronic and are filled out, reviewed, approved, signed and routed for printing on the spot. Continue reading →

In June, ImageSource was named Premier Partner of the Year, 2012 for the Western Region by Fujitsu Computer Products of America. This marks a whopping ninth time ImageSource has earned this status.

You could say, without question, that ImageSource likes Fujitsu scanners. We like them because Fujitsu invests in R & D and quality control to ensure an exceptional product line that continually evolves to meet the demands of an ever changing capture landscape.Continue reading →

I’ve worked in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) industry and sold software solutions in this space for over 12 years now. Since then I’ve been involved in hundreds of transactions and sales cycles with many Fortune 1000 companies. One thing that stands out very clearly in my time in this industry is the fact that I’ve never worked with a single organization that had a plan to realize the “Enterprise” part of Enterprise Content Management software.

One story that vividly sticks out in my mind is an engagement we were called into back in 2002 with a Global 1000 company that was evaluating ECM software to solve their invoice processing challenge. After an evaluation period that lasted about two months, we were selected as the vendor of choice and went into the contracts phase of this engagement. One of the things we wrote into the contract was a clause that stated this company retained the right to execute on an enterprise license for everything in our ECM product suite for a specified dollar amount within 365 days of the signed contract.

Exactly 364 days from the date we put that clause in the contract and the CIO of this particular company executed the option for our ECM software suite, and paid a significant sum to do it. When I met with this CIO a couple of weeks later to discuss his roll out plan he informed me that he didn’t have a plan to roll out the software and what he purchased was a “tool” for his “tool kit”. As I left the meeting I thought that was a rather odd statement for him to make and I filed the information away in my memory bank. As the days turned to weeks, then months and finally years, the “tool” that this particular CIO bought never left his tool kit. The sad conclusion to this story is that 5 years later this same CIO went through another ECM vendor evaluation and spent millions of dollars more on another enterprise license with another company. The challenge here wasn’t the software because the software (FileNet) at the time was a leader in the ECM space, the challenge was that this CIO didn’t have a deployment plan or a method to help him create one. Because of a lack of planning this CIO wasted millions of shareholders dollars in direct, indirect and opportunity costs because of his lack of foresight in planning.

The ImageSource ECMEcosystem™ consulting methodology was created with this dilemma in mind, the dilemma that companies don’t have the resources, expertise and time to strategically plan for successful project rollouts. Our ECMEcosystem can help organizations:

Create an appropriate strategy to help them rationalize their current ECM infrastructure

Assess the organizational maturity level and responsiveness to change

Monetize ECM in a way that is meaningful to C-Level executives

Accurately capture requirements and use cases to develop an accurate road map

Put together cost / benefits analysis to justify the payback and ROI of an ECM investment

One of the key questions every project team should ask themselves before engaging in ECM initiatives should be, “Wouldn’t it make more business sense for us to invest in some ECM planning before engaging in the complexity of ECM acquisition and project roll-outs?”

As someone once said, “If we never take the time to do something right, when are we ever going to find the time to do it over?” Those are words that ECM project teams should live by!!

Working in Enterprise Content Management for over 12 years often times I have found it somewhat difficult to explain what we do and/or sell. Have you?

I have found that who your audience is often dictates how you explain it. To an IT group I have described ECM in terms of storage and retrieval of images in to database/repository with searching capability, ability to apply rules for authentication and accessibility, removing silos of information, ability to do workflow and BPM, and other things like Meta-Data, networks, through-put and HA/DR. Sometimes their eyes gloss over and other times they “understand.”

To some business folks when I’ m talking ECM I most usually reference things like accessibility of their documentation, being able to search on key fields and automatically route work/documents/content without the use of email or paper files (at its simplest form) and its all stored in a database otherwise known as a “repository.” Or, when describing workflow, using the old analogy of a restaurant. When you go in to the establishment a hostess seats you, then you get a menu, a waiter comes up and then you order, that order goes back to the kitchen and you get your meal prepared, then after you have dessert, you get a bill, pay and get a receipt then the bus boy comes and cleans everything up – that’s a workflow.

But what do you say to your mother or father, sister or brother and even children (aka the layman)? I’ve tried things like, “I sell software that lifts information off paper or documents and puts that data in a data base that allows people to find it. Then the people can see the documents on their computer necessary to do their job.” But I still get a ‘blank stare.’

Then one day, maybe three or four months ago, my dad was asking me for his usual P.C. help and he said, “my printer/scanner isn’t reading the words as well as it used to.” Of course, that got my attention! Could my dad know what O.C.R. is? After 12 years of me talking about IBM, FileNet, EMC/Documentum, Microsoft , Captiva, Kofax, ImageSource and ILINX(r) and him saying, “I still don’t get what you do.” NO WAY! How could my dad possibly know about O.C.R?

So I asked him, “Dad, you know what OCR is?” Guess what, he replied YES! “Its that software that I use when I want to take words off my documents that are PDF or Tiffs”. BAM! He knew! Finally after 12 years he “figured it out” partially what I did for a living. Putting this in context, my dad is an automotive guy, first sales and then executive, who had never a need to do any “computing” most of his professional career.

We have a lot of acronyms in our ECM vocabulary: OCR, ICR, OMR, BPM, OSR, ODAR, HIPI, TIFF, etc etc etc. (I can go on for a lifetime of our acronyms). But what do you say so that IT people get what ECM is? What do YOU say to a business user, who never ever ever thought of this stuff day to day? What do you tell your mom, dad, brother, sister, what you do every day? What have you said that brings blank stares? But, most importantly, what have you said to a customer and then you saw the “light bulb” go off? It appears O.C.R. is making it in to the mainstream vocabulary, if my dad is any example, because he knows his, “HP MFP does OCR.”

I’m sitting in the local IBM ECM UserNet conference in Irvine and David Caldera, Product Marketing, is speaking about the IBM/FileNet road-map. He has communicated, and it is proven, that there is huge ROI in deploying ECM solutions in an enterprise. Many companies have jumped on the ECM bandwagon and have implemented storage and retrieval in their enterprise. But, how many have taken the initiative to actually truncate content at its source? What does this mean: truncate content at its source?

To truncate content at its source, I am referencing an initiative to keep electronic documents as electronic documents (i.e. not printing out the Word Document or Excel Spreadsheet for review), utilize fax server technology and ingest faxes as images (ingesting faxes directly in to a capture application so meta data can be attached to it and accessed through a repository), take in outside content as EDI and leave it as EDI (by utilizing COLD technology and storing it with users being able to view the content with template overlays), and leave email messages and their attachments in their electronic format (by capturing the email, ingest the email’s content and strip off the attachment so that it can be preserved in the repository in electronic form). A truly GREEN organization.

How can we help enterprises achieve this? One method is to simplify the process that content is captured at the end user. This may include embedding capture technology in every day applications like Word and Excel. A simple to use “button” placed in the application that evokes a simple window that allows the user to fill in one or two key meta data fields – like Kofax currently offers with Kofax Desktop and ImageSource offers with ILINX ® Capture. Another option is to leverage existing multifunction devices, having a capture application sweep the directory and push some light indexing or not, back to the submitter or sending it to a central data processing center. Most importantly, capturing the content in-process!

In-Process Capture through thin client applications is the most consistent and efficient way to truncate content at its source. Enabling knowledge workers to submit content as part of their process, versus at the end of their process. All knowledge workers, not just high volume workers, having this capability. Leveraging ad-hoc, highly distributed capture processes throughout an enterprise. For example, the executive assistant who has contracts, high dollar Purchase Orders, NDA’s, HR documents, or regulatory submissions being able to commit these documents right in to the repository or workflow. Another example, to enable agents or sales people in the field to submit claims, reports or expenses from their automobile, prior to leaving the customers parking lot, so that financial transaction can be processed immediately.

Some organizations “think green.” Its time now for these companies to go to the next step and put their IT projects behind these eco-friendly initiatives.

I attended the grand opening session for the conference today and thought it was well executed. The official title for the session is “Information-Led Transformation: Lead the Way” and it lasted for an hour and a half with entertainment, live interview from selected IBM customers and some statistics numbers from IBM.

I ended my Day 1 at the conference pondering the question: how can we deliver accurate information to the right resources in the shortest and most useful way?

Over the years, many organizations have extended centralized capture with thick client distributed capture components. More recently, some organizations have begun leveraging their MFPs/MFDs investment with technologies offering front panel integration. But this has lead to difficulty in managing all the various import possibilities, management of the changing hardware, and integration of disparate systems.

The varying systems have resulted in differing ways in which meta data is captured or even which fields are captured along with administrative management of many different systems. As an example most large IBM FileNet customers are running not only multiple versions of Content Services, Image Services and Panagon P8, but they also have multiple DR, Test and QA platforms for supporting new application deployment, upgrades and functional enhancements.

Having one application, that can manage inputs from fax servers, email, scanners, MFPs/MFDs, and file shares, which allow for consistent document management practices and complete control for records management is quickly becoming a high level priority in large organizations. With a centrally administered capture system, which can be pushed out to distributed users via a URL, allows for control for all content around the enterprise. With some thin client applications, best practices can be applied to all documents versus select documents by including fax, MFD/MFP and email ingestion to the processing.

So, when considering how an enterprise can manage all aspects of their day-to-day content, requiring one application to manage everything is quickly becoming a top requirement in “best practices.”

What the Experts are Saying: Technical Expertise for ECM

ClickOnce is a deployment technology that enables you to create self-updating Windows-based applications that can be installed and run with minimal user interaction. ClickOnce deployment provides 3 major benefits for any .NET application: Updates are provided automatically, downloading only those parts of the application that have changed. Each application is self-contained and cannot interfere with […]

Migrations from systems like IBPM to ILINX can be fraught with issues that can bite the unwary in very bad places. However, if you are aware of such problems, you can plan ways to mitigate them and have a successful migration in the end. One issue we run into is documents that have a page […]

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about ECM migrations, with a focus specifically on moving content from Oracle IPM/Imaging to other destination systems—projects we’ve been performing a lot of lately. Our tools of choice for migrations are ILINX Export and ILINX Import, but if the destination ECM system isn’t supported by ILINX Import, […]

One of the things we’ve always done a lot of here at ImageSource is migrations, it’s definitely one of our core competencies. For a little more information on our approach to migrations, you can review my earlier post here. Lately the migrations have been more focused because most of them involve moving content out of […]

Starting with ILINX Capture v6, the Release configurations are stored within the ILINX database. In ILINX Capture v5x, the ILINX Release configurations were stored in XML files on a disk. ILINX Capture called ILINX Release using a SendAndReceivedReply IXM. The change to store the settings within the ILINX database is very useful for a number of […]